When Trump bullies Mexico he pulls a symbolic lever, and
pieces and gears in the Western political system click ‘grammatically’ into
place, aligning so that Trump can advance the traditional pro-jihadi and
anti-Israel policies of the US power elite. More than racism, it’s psychological warfare. Trump is a
con artist. And you’ve been conned.

A more common model sees US politics
as a ‘free market’ of independent parties. In this view, Donald Trump is a
real competitor and his anti-Establishment rants, his loud denunciations of
Obama’s pro-jihadi and anti-Israel policies, and his campaign promise to
“drain the swamp” in Washington were all sincere.

To decide which model best matches
reality, we need evidence. Consider, for example, Trump’s choices for top
foreign-policy positions. These, it turns out, are all ‘swamp creatures’:
former Obama stalwarts and CFR Establishment types with a history of
promoting jihad and undermining Israel (Part 5). This evidence agrees with the
‘cartel’ but not the ‘free market’ model.

Useful evidence is like this: one
hypothesis can explain it, but not the other. It gives a system diagnostic.

The HIR model: it’s a cartel

For an example of useless evidence—the
kind we may safely ignore—consider the speech, much celebrated by his
supporters, that Trump delivered in Saudi Arabia, where he spoke against
jihadi terrorism. What does that tell us? Exactly nothing. To the ‘free
market’ model, this is sincere anti-jihadism; to the ‘cartel’ model, it’s a
‘grammatically’ forced move, required by Trump’s political theater (for he
needs to appear ‘anti-jihadist’).
Either or—we don’t know.

Such is always the case with words:
diametrically opposed theories can simultaneously explain them because they cost
nothing to produce. That’s why behavioral economists pay zero attention to verbal
expressions of purported values and preferences, or ‘cheap talk.’

By contrast, Trump’s $500 million in
precision guided munitions to Saudi Arabia, announced in the same trip, is not
cheap (it’s worth $500 million). And it matters, because Saudi Arabia

a)“plays
the lead role in financing contemporary Islamist movements, within the
Arab-Muslim world but also in Africa, Asia, and Europe”;

b)has
dotted the European landscape with mosques that radicalize Muslims in the Old
Continent; and

c)in collusion with the Obama
administration, recently sent its own weapons (which
it buys from the US) to jihadis in Syria, including ISIS.[0]

So, this is, once again, diagnostic
evidence. The ‘cartel’ model, by the lights of which—on substance—Trump is just
more Obama, can explain it; the ‘free market’ model, which has Trump as a
sincere anti-jihadist, cannot.

Now, a scientific model, to be any
good, must be productive. The
cartel model can account for a couple of things—fine; but can it account for
many more? To ask this question is to ‘test the model,’ by which process we
explore the limits of its explanatory reach. If the model can surprise us by
accounting for stuff that, intuitively, seemed outside of its purview, then
it is a good model indeed.

Here is a claim that most will find
surprising:

The
ruling cartel’s pro-jihad and anti-Israeli thrust is what explains Trump’s
bullying of Mexico.

I know what you’re thinking. I am
supposed to be doing geopolitics and I can’t even get my map straight. Mexico
is far from Israel, and hardly a major player in Middle-Eastern politics.

Yes, but the map that counts here is
the identity field. Whoever can
shape it can render certain moves on
the physical map possible or impossible. It is the essence of
psychological warfare and requires a grasp of ‘political grammar.’

Here’s what I mean. When Trump bullies
Mexico, this is a symbolic move. It’s not really about Mexico—or not just about Mexico. He is playing for a
US audience, a European audience, an Israeli audience—in short, for the whole
West. It’s part of the ruling cartel’s grand show.

Millions of Westerners with a
‘left-liberal’ identity, when they see Mexico getting bullied, feel an
identity-driven emotion: they hate Trump. It is then quite enough, to make
these people hate an idea, to make that idea come out of Trump’s mouth.

This
is power—the power to direct minds.

Of course, Trump can also be used to
manipulate people on the ‘right.’ Some ideas out of Trump’s mouth, which
‘left-liberals’ are taught to hate, are precisely those that people on the
‘right’ had been waiting years to hear from a US president, and which make
these latter love Trump. The effect
is to make the two camps irreconcilable. (Divide and rule.)

This is a wide-spectrum psychological
weapon: it works for all sorts of things coming out of Trump’s mouth. But our
focus is the Middle East, so I will pay attention to how, by thus
manipulating people, the cartel creates a political ecology where it may
continue (in its Trump version) with its pro-jihadi and anti-Israel policies.
These policies endanger your liberties.

It works because you don’t understand
it. But I shall explain it.

He’s the con artist; you’re the mark.

My demonstration that you’ve been
conned has four stages.

First (Part 7), I show that—aside from style—there
is nothing new in Trump’s bullying of Mexico. In fact, in recent history, US
policy towards Mexico was never so violent as during the Bush Jr.-Obama
period. Obama II—better known as ‘Donald Trump’—carries it forward.

Second (Part 8), I show that Trump is an
accomplished con artist. In fact, this is not the first time that the US
ruling cartel has deceived us by having Trump make an issue of Mexicans.

Third (Part 9), I explain how Trump’s present
‘anti-Mexico’ con works to divide Westerners into separate, antagonistic
identities that render us defenseless against the jihadi onslaught.

And finally (Part 10), I explain the entire suite of
Trump’s foreign policies from the vantage point of this unifying perspective
to show you where the system is really going. I am afraid I have bad news for
Israelis.

Before I do all this, a disclosure: I
am a Mexican citizen, writing from Mexico City.

[0]To get a sense for the effect of
Saudi Arabia’s dollars, consider Sweden. As Wikipedia
explains, “The governments of Saudi Arabia and Libya have financially
supported the constructions of some of the largest Mosques in Sweden.” What
Swedish Muslims hear in those mosques is consistent with the reigning
ideology in Saudi Arabia: Salafism or Wahhabism, which preaches the
application of totalitarian Muslim Sharia law and the murder of ‘infidels.’

According
to an article in the Swedish media (Dagens Nyheter), the number of ‘no go’
zones in that country, where even the Swedish police dare not tread (given
the levels of religious extremism and criminality), has been rising steeply.
In fact, there has been a 50% increase in such areas in just the last two
years. And they are getting larger. In some of these places, even the Post
Office no longer delivers, judging them too dangerous (read about this in
English here).

More
widely, Saudi dollars cause plenty of other trouble, for

“Saudi
Arabia plays the lead role in financing contemporary Islamist movements,
within the Arab-Muslim world but also in Africa, Asia, and Europe.”

—Labevière,
Richard. 2000. Dollars for Terror: The
United States and Islam. New York: Algora Publishing. (p.231)

So,
Trump is making massive transfers of weapons to Saudi Arabia because he is
different from Obama? Because he is sincere about fighting jihadi terror? I
hope the sarcastic tone is coming through. Obviously, the ‘free market’ model
of US politics cannot account for this evidence.

[2]“Under these secret agreements,
US DEA agents met repeatedly with high-level members of particular drug
cartels, especially the Sinaloa group, to obtain information about rival
organizations. Informants served as go-betweens in contacts between the DEA
and “El Chapo” Guzmán, the head of that cartel. …The DEA arranged to dismiss
drug trafficking charges that were pending in the United States against some
of their Sinaloa Cartel informants. In other words, it allowed the cartels
with which it worked to continue business—and murder—as usual.”

[3]“In the debacle known as ‘Fast
and Furious,’ the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF)
allowed ‘more than 2,000 weapons, including hundreds of AK-47-type
semi-automatic rifles and .50 caliber rifles,’ to ‘walk’ across the border
and into the hands of the Mexican cartels. Its ostensible purpose was to
follow the guns in hopes that they would lead to the arrest of high-level
cartel leaders. But relevant agencies of the Mexican government were never
informed about the operation, and it seems that there was no actual effort to
track the weapons once they crossed the Mexican border. The weapons turned up
at crime scenes in both Mexico and the United States. On December 14, 2010,
near the Mexican border in Arizona, one of them killed Brian Terry, a US
Border Patrol agent.

ATF
wasn’t the only agency involved in ‘Fast and Furious.’ Personnel from ICE,
the Department of Homeland Security, the DEA, and the US Attorney’s Office in
Arizona also participated, along with the FBI and the IRS.”

[4]‘Fast and Furious’ became a
scandal because US Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was killed in Arizona with
one of the guns that US authorities had supplied to Mexican drug cartels, and
the investigators in charge of that murder doggedly followed their leads.
This is chance. Happenstance. Other such operations to undermine Mexican
democracy may exist, but without the same stroke of ‘luck’ (apologies to
Terry’s family), we may never find out about them.

“behead
people by the hundreds… heap headless, handless bodies along roadsides as
warnings to those who would resist their power.”

I
remember a different Mexico. As a kid, at the barber shop, I would ogle
clandestinely this horrific tabloid, ¡Alarma!,
which collated, as a kind of pornography, gruesome photos of mutilated and
burnt bodies and stories of back-alley tortures. Those were the good old
days! For only the innocent can be thus titillated. There is no market for
that today, when every newspaper has become ¡Alarma!

[8]Alejandro Madrazo, a respected
analyst of the Mexican ‘war on drugs’ working out of CIDE, in Mexico City,
explained to me that these are (reasonable) estimates. But nobody really
knows, and the numbers could be higher. (personal communication)

[9]“Despite growing resources
directed at supply-side enforcement, the illicit drug market has continually
expanded, and is now estimated by the UN to turn over more than $330 billion
a year, a figure that dwarfs the GDP of many countries.”

[11]“Halting
U.S. firearms trafficking to Mexico: A report by senators Dianne
Feinstein, Charles Schumer, and Sheldon Whitehouse to the United States
Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control; One Hundred Twelfth
Congress, FIRST SESSION; June 2011.

[14]“When Pat Buchanan first
proposed building a fence on the Mexican border, the Republican establishment
was shocked, shocked! The candidate’s sister and campaign manager, Bay
Buchanan, pushed for language in the 1992 GOP platform calling for
‘structures’ on the border. Surely you don’t mean a fence, she was told.
‘We’re not talking about lighthouses,’ she replied.”

[19]Though Buchanan pretends to be
outside the Establishment, it isn’t true. Like Stone, he cut his teeth with
Richard Nixon, whose speeches he wrote (he was “ ‘like a father to me,’ ”
says Buchanan). Ronald Reagan was fond of those speeches, apparently, because
he asked Buchanan to be his communications director, after which Buchanan
became a tremendous force in the mainstream media.

Will Trump be different? Israeli patriots expect
him to be. After all, he postures as an enemy of Iran and ISIS. But, what
evidence will be diagnostic that Trump really is delivering on his Mideast
promises?

Can Trump (assuming he wants to)
transform US foreign policy in the Middle East? To get a sense for how
difficult this might be, we must appreciate how traditional the pro-jihadi
policy has been. (It wasn’t just Obama.)

According to many in the mainstream
media, the Trump-Netanyahu summit evidenced a ‘pro-Israeli’ turn. That
would be a direct challenge to the HIR model. But we don’t see it. The
result of the summit, we claim, was ‘pro Iran.’ To say otherwise, as we
show, requires important historical omissions.

Is US policy-making run by a bipartisan elite
cartel? Perhaps the president is a figurehead; the media show changes, but
the long-term goals—chosen by the CFR—are always the same. If so, Trump’s
Middle East policies will feel different, but they will yield familiar
fruits.

When Trump bullies Mexico he pulls a symbolic
lever, and pieces and gears in the Western political system click
‘grammatically’ into place, aligning so that Trump can advance the
traditional pro-jihadi and anti-Israel policies of the US power elite. More
than racism, it’s psychological warfare. Trump is a con artist. And you’ve
been conned.

Except for the declared US-Mexican War of the
19th c., US policy has never been so violent against Mexico as in the Bush
Jr.-Obama period. What changes with Trump is just the style—and that’s the
clue that this is a con—.

In the year 2000 a well-known businessman and
media personality announced himself as presidential candidate in order to
fight racism, denounce border walls, and defend Mexicans. His name was
Donald Trump.

To preserve the West as the refuge of human
rights and modern liberties, we need to be, simultaneously, pro-liberty and anti-jihad. But the
identity-driven emotions stirred by the anti-Mexico con make Westerners
either 1) anti-jihad but fascist; or 2) pro-liberty but pro-Islam. Either
combination dooms the West.

Trump, naturally, makes a few noises to satisfy
those who expect him to implement an anti-jihadi and pro-Israeli foreign
policy—these are obligated moves, forced by the political grammar. But if
we look at what Trump is achieving, we find that, like his predecessors, he
is making radical Islam stronger and Israel weaker.